Hell yeah, see, take a VW Passat for instance, it's what, around 20K over there? Guess what, they cost round 40K here. 108% tax on cars over factory price, so most any car in U.S. will be roughly twice as costly here.

Something like a Chevy Van with some passenger conversion options, or a Ram extended, could be priced at like $100K easy.
The thing is, you have to live abroad for a year to be able to bring it in tax-free...if it's just 6 months for instance, you bring a car that cost 50K, you'll pay 54K taxes on top of it...

Shipping a car costs merely 1500 or so...that's what a container costs, and it will carry 2 cars plus lots of bikes, ATV's etc. So yeah, cars, in our point of view, cost nothing in U.S.

Quite often, a car will be the most expensive thing a family ever buys. And it's not just the starting price, there's the yearly car taxes, gasoline is like $12 a gallon etc. etc...

I think it'd have to be so close to the university where she works that she could literally walk there...or some other similarly handy means of transport.